The present invention relates to an apparatus for wet-heat treating a knitted fabric, particularly a cylindrical one, continuously in a high pressure steamer for subjecting the fabric to such treatments as pre-treatment and dyeing. By wet-heat treatment of a textile material is meant steaming a textile material soaked with a pre-treating solution such as a caustic alkali solution for pre-treatment or soaked with a dye solution for dyeing under wet-heat at high temperature and pressure.
For wet-heat treating a cylindrical knitted fabric, it has conventionally been adopted such method as to soak a cylindrical knitted fabric to be treated with a treating solution (such as a caustic alkali solution for pre-treatment and a dye solution for dyeing) and to wet-heat treat the resultant fabric in a reaction tower or in a steamer maintained with a sufficiently high temperature wet-heat, or to transport a cylindrical knitted fabric through a treating solution stored in a liquid tank provided in a steamer body and to wet-heat treat the fabric in the said steamer body. In such a method, however, since a cylindrical knitted fabric is soaked only one time with the treating solution, the treating solution can with difficultly penetrate into the core part of the fabric particularly when the fabric is composed of thick and voluminous, yarn and consequently, the fabric cannot be treated uniformly leaving unreacted parts to deteriorate the commodity value of the treated fabric. Furthermore, while the treating solution has conventionally been applied outside of the steamer, uniform treatment of a fabric can with difficulty be done owing to the fluctuation of the amount of the treating solution applied to the fabric due to the change of the atmospheric temperature.
In wet-heat treating a cylindrical knitted fabric by transporting a fabric through a steamer continuously, it has conventionally been adopted to provide a plurality of guide rolls for passing the fabric up and down zigzag in the steamer body in order to prolong the treating time or the stay period of the fabric in the steamer body. However, the interval (or head) between the two guide rolls provided up and down must be tolerably large to guide a fabric effectively, so that a tension is applied unavoidably to the fabric due to its own weight containing a large amount of the treating solution causing such troubles that the cylindrical knitted fabric is elongated and the amount of the treating solution becomes poor at both sides of the fabric. From this point, too, uniform and satisfactory treatment of a cylindrical knitted fabric can hardly be done.